Communicator 3000 MPE/iX Release 6.0 (Platform Software Release C.60.00) (30216-90269)

186 Chapter 10
Technical Articles
Year 2000 and Other Enhancements in VPLUS
• If the Data Type is blank, all newly created fields for the form will
have a Data Type of “CHAR.”
Ability to Define More than 52 Single Character
Fields per Form
This enhancement allows more than 52 single character fields to be
defined for a Form. Currently the field tag which is defined for a field at
screen design (creation) time should begin with an alphabetic character.
This enhancement will allow several other characters to be used for the
field tag, thus increasing the number of single character fields that can
be defined for a Form.
The following are the other characters which can be used for the field
tag (defined at screen creation time):
Digits 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9
Specials @,#,$,%,&,*,-,+,<,>,/,\,!,|,=,?,;,_
Field Menu Initialization
In the case where one of the characters listed above (a Digit or a
Special) is used in a single character field, the Field Name will be
blanked out when the Field Menu is invoked for the field the first time.
The user should input a new name for the field in this case. With this
enhancement, a maximum of 80 single character fields can be defined
for a Form.
Compatibility issues
Forms created with previous versions of FORMSPEC can be used with
this version without any modifications.
Forms created with this version of FORMSPEC can be used with existing
applications without any modifications.
Forms created with this version of FORMSPEC can be used with previous
versions of FORMSPEC. However, some extra characters may appear
near the bottom of the Form Menu screen which should be ignored.
These extraneous characters appear only once, the first time the Form
Menu is invoked for the form, and they do not affect the functionality in
any way.
New Intrinsics to Get and Set Save Field Values
Two new intrinsics have been added to VPLUS to enable applications to
access Save Fields. They are VGETSAVEFIELD and VPUTSAVEFIELD.
The values of Save Fields can be accessed/changed using the new
intrinsics. It is important to note that the values of the Save Fields
cannot be modified in the forms file by these intrinsics.